Wireless communications devices can be used to obtain services from remote devices. These services may provide location-specific information regarding topics, such as weather forecasts, local dining and shopping, maps, transit schedules, etc. Various technologies, such as cellular and short-range networking technologies, may be employed in the retrieval of such services.
Examples of short-range networking technologies include Bluetooth and wireless local area networks (WLAN). Bluetooth provides a short-range radio network, originally intended as a cable replacement. It can be used to create ad hoc networks of up to eight devices, where one device is referred to as a master device. The other devices are referred to as slave devices. The slave devices can communicate with the master device and with each other via the master device. The devices operate in the 2.4 GHz radio band reserved for general use by Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) applications. Bluetooth devices are designed to find other Bluetooth devices within their communications range and to discover what services they offer.
WLANs are local area networks that employ high-frequency radio waves rather than wires to exchange information between devices. IEEE 802.11 refers to a family of WLAN standards developed by the IEEE.
Other short-range technologies are also applicable for the exchange of information at higher data rates. Ultra wideband (UWB) is an example of such a higher data rate technology. There are many UWB transmission techniques One UWB technique is called impulse radio (IR). In IR, data is transmitted by employing short baseband pulses that are separated in time by gaps. Thus, IR does not use a carrier signal. These gaps makes IR much more immune to multipath propagation problems than conventional continuous wave radios. RF gating is a particular type of IR in which the impulse is a gated RF pulse. This gated pulse is a sine wave masked in the time domain with a certain pulse shape.
A mobile device may store and display information that allows a user to initiate service sessions with various remote service providers. To reduce the amount of user interaction required for session initiation, the device's user interface may provide such information in the form of links. Because such services often pertain to particular locations, a device may collect a large amount of service related information over of relatively short period of time. Accordingly, techniques are needed for the storage and management of such information.